Don’t Submit this Story to Digg

Warning: submitting this story to Digg will result in a quick burial.

Over the last two months, we’ve had a lot of fun with this blog, thinking of stories and headlines that would appeal to social media users.  Since social news is the topic, we didn’t think it would be that hard.  All three of us are active on several SM sites with friends who are even more active.  It was the perfect fit.

After 8 stories that made the front page of Digg, we have officially pissed some people off.  It’s my fault for being too arrogant, too greedy, too addicted to the traffic boost and mass exposure.  We used a ton of “digg bait” that has proven to be our downfall.

As an experienced Digger told me yesterday, “here’s the thing, digg, it seems, gets annoyed if a small bloggers gets too much attention.”  At that point, it really hit home.  Too much attention. Makes sense.

With headlines like Front Page Addiction: Destroying Families, Ruining Lives and Digg is from Mars, Reddit is from Uranus, it was clear to most that the intention of the stories was to get social media readers.  We wanted to go popular and we did what we thought would work.

Whether it’s the fabled “autobury” status Copyblogger suffers from (which is unlikely, since our blog is probably too small for that) or if we just made enough people angry to grab the handful of Spam buries that it takes to kill a story, it is officially not possible for a story submitted from this blog to make it more than a few hours before being removed from the Upcoming section.

Nothing changes on our end, though.  We’ve picked up a nice amount of subscribers, plus the stories still do very well on other social media websites, so the original goal of offering opinions, analysis, and even the occasional news story about social media will continue.

Digg, it was fun while it lasted.  Maybe someday we’ll make it back into your good graces.  Until then, you’ll be missed.

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Tagged as: Digg, Social Media, Social News Sites, socialmedia, socialnews